iiMedia Research: China's food delivery market reached $208B in 2023, 2.3x the size in 2020; Meituan and Ele.me employ over 10M gig workers combined
Takashi Kawakami / Nikkei Asia :
Context & Ripple Effects
China’s delivery sector had already been scaling rapidly: Meituan reported 29% year-over-year Q3 sales growth in 2020, providing an earlier operating signal behind the market’s subsequent expansion.
The new market and workforce figures put Meituan’s delivery business in a broader labor-intensive context. Later coverage of continued core-delivery growth suggests the category remained central to the company’s expansion.
First-order effects
- Meituan and Ele.me are immediately shown to rely on a combined workforce of more than 10 million gig workers, making courier availability and management core operating inputs.
- A market valued at $208B gives the two platforms a much larger delivery base to serve than in 2020, reinforcing the strategic weight of their core food-delivery operations.
Second-order effects
- Courier labor conditions become a more consequential variable for platform capacity, service quality, and unit economics as delivery volume scales.
- Restaurants and merchants become more dependent on the reach and logistics performance of the dominant delivery platforms to access digital food-demand.
Third-order effects
- If this scale persists, food delivery will increasingly function as a major channel for urban gig work, tying platform growth more closely to labor-market conditions than a purely software-led marketplace.
- The sector’s long-run economics will depend on whether large platforms can expand delivery demand without proportionally increasing the operational complexity of managing vast courier networks.
The trend: China’s food-delivery market is evolving from a fast-growing consumer internet service into a large-scale logistics and gig-work system.